Nature consciousness - no rape

People talk and act like idiots when it comes to interacting with their own environment. They try to give it their own value system. We are both a selfish and a dominating society, that does not like to be sensitive about other species that cohabit with us. Take our animals, for instance. We anthropomorphize them, often to our advantage. We use their behavior to give rationale to our acts, and we use our behavior to give a human facet to their acts. It is a violence in a sense. Time and again, we prove nothing, but how we have chosen to live in a suspension of reality or in abundance of superstition or in aloofness to everything that's not about our survival and displaying an insensitivity when it is about our survival.

Take an example of fables of animals raping humans. Bears are especially infamous. Hill folk tales abound with a bear having taken a damsel away to his cave and shown care and love, and ultimately sexual advances. Poor bears; they never raped anybody even in their own species, and they get the label of a libidinous abductor.

Or how the behavior of a particular gorilla in Australian zoo was equated to rape, and shown as an insight into our primitive instincts. In science world, such things rarely contribute to a body of knowledge that helps us in understanding our nature, but in the popular world any semblance is received with an enthusiasm that nothing but domain illeteracy can explain.

Dolphins, recently, have been found to 'rape' their handlers. Well, that rape is something more akin to frottage. Dogs do it, to children, beds, balls, poles, your legs, anything. Since dolphin's moments of spiked libido happen in water, obviously the struggle to get away will be harder (and funnier), and it'll make news.

When a dog urinates on a fire hydrant, that is neither an obscene gesture nor an act of vandalism. It is just a dog being a dog. The moment, even the instant, you try to attribute societal motives to the actions of an entirely different species, no matter how close the evolutionary relationship to your own, you have just stepped into extremely murky waters. If the societal motive you choose to attribute to such a species just happens to be human-oriented, you have stepped back out of murky water and squarely landed on a island made of faulty assumptions - in short you are now anthropomorphizing your subject.

"Rape" and "sexism" carry moral judgments. "Grief" does not. Moral judgments should be reserved for people, in my humble judgment. I think it's problematic to impute internal attributes such as will and consent and right and wrong to other animals. It's more straightforward to describe the orangutan behavior just like Barbara did, i.e. "unlike gorillas, they sometimes physically restrain a female and mate with her even as she cries out and struggles."

What I'm about though is saying that these behaviors are not natural in the sense of inevitable either in our closest cousins the apes, or as evolutionary roots of behavior for us. I don't think, to go a bit further, that we have "a human nature," for example: we evolved to be flexible according to our circumstances. We have laid a violent foundation to our interaction with our environment, which falters in the very understanding of it.

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